Musk says AI can't be stopped and we shouldn't press the stop button anyway
r0ck3t23 · x · 2026-08-19
In a recent interview, Elon Musk said he sees "no way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots," adding that "even if there was a stop button, we probably shouldn't press it, because the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all."
The poster argues that Musk—arguably the loudest AI-risk alarmist of the past decade, who also owns an AI lab and a humanoid robot program—shifting from warning to "enjoy the ride" is itself informative: he never underestimated the downside. The poster also notes that "inevitability" is a standard escape hatch, yet Musk separates his inability to stop it from his endorsement, so neither props up the other.
The thread closes on a bigger thesis: the bottleneck on every unsolved problem in history was the number of minds that could try—AI ends that scarcity.
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